


Pieces of You

by howelllesters



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2012 Phan, Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Ed Sheeran-inspired, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-09-23 20:57:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9676604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howelllesters/pseuds/howelllesters
Summary: Songfic inspired by Photograph by Ed Sheeran.





	

_loving can hurt/loving can hurt sometimes/but it’s the only thing that i know_

Being in love isn’t supposed to be this painful.

Falling in love, that can hurt. On your tiptoes the entire time, desperately trying not to stumble, creeping around unspoken emotions and well aware that at any moment, the floor could fall from underneath you, unexpected and unwelcome unless there’s someone waiting to catch you.

Falling out of love, he thinks that must be unbearable. Having the knowledge that something has changed gradually sink in, looking at the person you once loved most in the world and one day realising that everything has changed, and you don’t know how to fix it. And sometimes it isn’t even slow, sometimes it’s fast and bitter and it’s filled with shouting and crying and slammed doors and empty beer bottles.

He hasn’t experienced it though, but he thinks that soon he just might, and somehow, somehow that’s almost more appealing than what he’s going through right now.

Because being in love isn’t supposed to make your heart ache. It isn’t supposed to be the reason you dread opening your eyes on a morning, isn’t supposed to be the unspoken words on your lips where your silent tears are drying every night.

He can remember when they first started out, first tried this whole dating thing, only it was never dating. They fell in love hard and fast, and maybe that was the problem, maybe they rushed things, and they exploded and burnt out too quickly. It still didn’t feel like that though. He was sure, he could swear he still felt it from time to time, he was almost certain that their fire wasn’t out yet, it was just struggling to get going again.

At times like this, he can just about convince himself that everything is normal, and he laughs to himself, a cynical, twisted laugh that echoes around the empty apartment and makes him feel sick to his stomach.

His other half, older counterpart, boyfriend in the loosest possible sense of the word because he can’t even remember the last time they acted like friends, he’s somewhere else, making his way across the country to get home, and once upon a time he could have probably told you his exact co-ordinates at any given moment, and now he just doesn’t care.

That’s a lie. He cares too much. He cares so much it kills him. Every text with just a one word answer, every phone call that ends with a frosty goodbye, every ‘I love you’ that neither of them even attempts to make sound genuine, they’re all tiny stabs of pain in his chest, icy shards that are freezing his heart over, and god he’s so scared that they’re not going to solve this, that it will be too late.

He cannot bear the idea of a life without this man, but right now, he cannot bear life with him.

It’s like they’ve lost themselves somewhere, but they can’t start trying to find a way out until they decide where the hell they’re going. This whole thing has just been a trainwreck, one disaster after another, and they’ve just been crashing through them, momentum building, both of them powerless to stop it.

And now they’re here, and sometimes they sleep in separate beds, and they haven’t kissed properly in months, and the worst part is, he can see his own broken expression reflected in his lover’s eyes and yet they still can’t help one another.

Is this it? Is this breaking point?

The sun has been setting as he’s just been curled up on the sofa, reflecting on life. It’s always been easy for him to trail down a dark path of thoughts, but nowadays he finds himself there almost every night. He loses hours to the darkness, resurfacing to find he’s been daydreaming about the past and they’re very much still stuck in this limbo of a present, or worse, he’s been thinking about a future that once he thought was set in stone, and is now hanging by a thread.

about an hour away xx

The vibration of his phone makes him leap out of his seat, heart breaking all over again as he sees the message is short enough for him to read without even picking up the device, and god, he thought he’d be used to it by now but he’s always proving himself wrong.

Standing up, because moving has got to help somehow, he has every intention of going to the kitchen to get a drink, something to eat, just to move off that goddamn sofa where they used to fall asleep wrapped up in one another, but somehow he finds himself staring at one of their little coffee tables.

It’s piled high with utter rubbish, scraps of paper and bills paid months ago and letters that never made it to the bin, along with a bunch of stuff one or the other has just dropped there and forgotten about.

Beneath it all though, he can see the corner of a photoframe peeking out, and his curiosity gets the better of him, his desire to break himself bit by bit gets the better of him.

Not caring about the avalanche of sheets he offsets, he picks the frame up and stares at the two faces grinning out of it, wondering what the hell happened to the two boys who fell in love with each other’s pixelated faces in the early hours of the morning, who planned to take on the world together and were now freefalling into some oblivion they didn’t even seem afraid of.

A hiccup escapes him before he even realises that tears are racing down his cheek, his memory supplying the crystal clear image of those two smiles as the real thing becomes blurry. With shaking fingers, he turns the frame over and undoes the back, fumbling with his actions but finally managing it, the crumpled piece of paper falling into his hands.

He discards the empty frame and clutches the photo, wishing more than anything they could get back to this. It’s three years old, and somehow three years feels like nothing and everything at the same time.

This is his goal. He’s been drifting for weeks, months now, not sure of where he’s going, where they’re going, what they’re looking for, but it’s this. It has to be this. This was the first time he was ever happy, and he’s determined to get it back, he has to. It won’t happen overnight, and there’s so much to figure out, because god the internet is the best and worst place, and behind closed doors they’ve exchanged some unforgivable comments, but there’s an innocence in the way they’re smiling at the camera for this photo, a kind of love that hasn’t been tainted by real life, and he’s going to fight for it.

He briefly thinks that they could just leave these sorts of photos as they are. They could stop trying so hard with this, could just look at a picture like this and remember their time fondly, and then just carry on, accepting that they had something so beautiful that they were never going to be able to save,

He really wants to save it though.

Not right now though. Right now he’s tired, tired of this, tired of all of the arguments and the tears and the hours that pass in silence, of the forced smiles when they’re out and about and the way they have to do things together when sometimes they haven’t seen each other in a full day.

Their apartment is small, and yet they can avoid each other for as long as they need to when the time calls for it.

Photo still clutched in his hand, he makes his way around the rest of the room, needing to find other proof that they had this once, that they had something worth tearing themselves apart and rebuilding each other up over.

He finds photos long-forgotten, frames that have been covered up by less important things, but at the time, anything seemed more important than the relationship their entire home was built on. He realises, as he pulls loose snapshots and broken photoframes out from behind CD cases and books and board games and a dozen other pointless household objects, that neither of them has given it a second thought when they’ve covered these photos with something else, and that is so, so wrong.

When his arms are too full of frames to stop something smashing, he empties the haul onto the sofa and feverishly rips all of the images from their homes, gathering them close, as if he can win back those times just by reliving the memories. He’s near hysterical but he doesn’t even notice, already used to the tears that won’t stop streaming and the moans he can’t stop making.

He’s got at least twenty photos spread out before him, all of them nearly identical, just two boys with too long hair and silly faces and sheer happiness in their eyes facing a camera, but it’s still not enough.

Leaving them scattered across the sofa and coffee table, he raids the rest of the flat, dragging every forgotten photo out from its hiding place. He goes to the box in his room where he stores every image they don’t frame, and he knows his boyfriend has an identical box, because they can’t get rid of each other, as much as they might want to.

No, he stops himself, a moment of clarity. He doesn’t want to get rid of him. He wants to keep him forever.

The floor becomes his friend, not even making it to the sofa cushion. Tipping the contents of each box out on to the hard wood, he goes through every single photo, throat and eyes hurting from how much he’s crying, but not caring. When he’s done, he just starts again, sitting there amongst the paper images and just clutching at them randomly, remembering moments they thought were precious enough to document.

Until now, they haven’t been sure of where they need to go. Both of them are angry, and both of their arguments are perfectly valid and invalid at the same time, and it’s brought them to a stalemate that neither is willing to break any time soon. It’s hard to try and fix something when you don’t know how it needs to be put back together.

What are they waiting for? An apology? A miracle? Someone to show them what they need to do from here on out? Well that’s not happening, and he knows, he’s more certain of this than anything else in the last few months, that if they can just find somewhere to aim for, they can probably do it.

And their aim has to be the years they’ve left behind, the memories stashed in these photographs, because it’s all they’ve got to go on, and he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that he will never love anyone as much as he loved the boy in these photos at these moments.

Times passes and he doesn’t want to move so he drifts in and out of sleep, sometimes crying, sometimes snuffling, sometimes staring blankly at a random photo until it sets him off again and he’s sobbing, inhuman sounds that he should be ashamed of, but this is nearly a year of pent up emotion, and now that he’s started, he can’t stop.

The front door opening escapes his notice, and he only registers that there’s another person in the flat when the floorboards near him creak under quick footsteps.

“Dan?” Phil is asking urgently, hands on his shoulders, shaking him as gently as possible, but Dan’s barely coherent, eyes squeezed tight as sobs wrack his body.

Phil is still babbling to him, and Dan doesn’t have a clue what he wants from him until he feels strong arms trying to move him, and then he gives in, letting Phil haul him up off the floor only to catch him again once they’re upright.

“What’s wrong?” Phil asks worriedly, one hand round his waist, one hand on the back of his head, and it’s the closest they’ve been in months, and Dan’s barely aware of this fact.

When it becomes apparent that Dan isn’t going to be able to explain himself for a while yet, hands fiercely gripping Phil’s sweatshirt, burrowing his face into Phil’s neck and letting his tears make his shoulder soggy, Phil tries to assess the situation. There are empty photoframes across the sofa, and with a frown, he looks down to see hundreds of photos of the two of them on the floor, and he starts to understand.

His own heart beginning to hurt a little, he holds his boyfriend tighter, whispering nonsensical words of comfort in his ear.

They are broken, and that realisation has come crashing down on them in a single night.

Phil’s staring down at the same two faces Dan was looking at earlier, and his thoughts are heading somewhere similar.

They were perfect once. They were more than perfect. They were two people, two halves of a whole, in their own bubble, and it was the happiest place on earth, and then the world intervened, the bubble burst, and they lost sight of each other in the aftermath.

Tonight though, tonight they’ve found each other again, and their nerves are standing on edge as they both realise the only thing worse than this would be losing the person currently in their arms.

Tomorrow will be a day of awkward conversation, arguments that go round in circles, angry tears and sad tears and happy tears, replacing photos in frames and making sure those frames take pride of place in their home again. It will be a day of testing the waters, and setting new rules, and probably pushing each other to their limits, but it will be a fresh start, and for the first time in a while, they will be able to see where they’re going.

For now though, for now they will stand together and let the house grow dark around them, holding the other so tightly they’ll start to fit back together.

_i swear it will get easier/remember that with every piece of you_


End file.
